Git and Github

In class today, we talked about git and github. I always find it hard to distinguish git from GitHub clearly, but for the first part of class, we used git without GitHub and then incorporated GitHub later, which made the difference very clear. 

As we studied in CSC 226: Software Design and Implementation, git is a distributed version control software that makes copies of the project directories at different timestamps, compares them to the initial directories, and saves the changes. Unlike centralized version control systems, git eliminates having one central point of error because it is distributed. The distributed version control system enables each user who clones the project files to have a copy of the entire project.

Whereas git is the actual version control system, GitHub is a website service that provides remote storage of the local versions of the repository.

Additionally, I learned how to write good commit messages. When I used git in CSC courses, my commit messages are always in the past tense, such as “Added file2 to repository”. However, a good commit should be in the imperative mood; that is, it should be able to answer “If applied, this commit will….” My previous commit message would translate to “Add file 2 repository” When I read this, I wondered why the imperative mood was preferred to the indicative way because at the point of writing the commit message, I have “added” the file. This is best justified when we make a pull request on GitHub, the commit is never “merge changes requested” but rather “merge changes request” hence git uses the imperative mood whenever it creates a commit on my behalf, so should I in my commit messages.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chris.beams.io. 2020. How To Write A Git Commit Message. https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit Accessed 2 July 2020.